‘Eddie, they’ll arrest you’

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There is a fabulous snippet of cycling history in the latest edition of Rouleur, which has a Spanish theme. It profiles the former Basque rider Txomin Perurena, a Tour de France King of the Mountains winner in 1974 and twice Spanish road race champion. Perurena rode for the Basque team sponsored by drinks company Kas, and was a contemporary of the great Eddie Merckx.

The story is about a stage of the 1974 Tour that crossed the border into Spain. Perurena:

We’d taught him [Mercx] Euskera, which is even more difficult than Flemish. Well, not all of the Basque language, only one phrase: “Gora Euskadi Askatuta” (‘Long live the freedom of the Basque country’.) It was Santi Lazcano who had taught him, and all Mercx could think of doing was to start shouting it in the middle of the pack when the Tour got to Spain, a stage that ended in La Seu d’Urgell.

“You’re crazy, Eddie”, we would tell him, “if the Guardia Civil hear you, they’ll arrest you.” … It was 1974 and Franco was still alive. Spain was still a dictatorship.

Perurena’s brother was a member of the Basque separatist group ETA and was shot on the street in 1984, a decade after Franco’s death by the Spanish mercenary paramilitaries GAL. They had been hired by Spanish police with the secret approval of the government to fight a so-called ‘dirty war’ against ETA.

The Basques are passionate and committed cycling fans, and you see their flag on Pyreneean stages of the Tour, along with another black and white flag that supports a prisoners’ repatriation campaign. It wants those ETA members still in jail returned to the region from far-flung parts of Spain and France to serve the rest of their sentence in one of the region’s jails, so that friends and family can visit them.

The former Basque cycling team Euskatel, with its striking orange tops, was part funded by local subscription in the region, and had a policy of hiring only riders who were born or brought up in the region. Elsewhere, in his wonderful book of stories about the Basque area, Obabakoak, Bernardo Atxaga has a story about a cyclist that stands in some ways for the loss of childhood.

In the interview, by Carlos Arribas, Perurena tells the story of the day he lost the lead in the Tour of Spain in 1975. At the start of the decisive time trial, he was ahead by more than a minute. The time trial ended in the velodrome in San Sebastian/Donostia, in front of Basque fans.

“On entering the velodrome and hearing the silence that greeted me from the fans, I knew I hadn’t succeeded. In the end I lost by 14 seconds, half a lap… I’ll never get that silence out of my head… That’s how I lost the Vuelta in front of the home fans.”